When did free sucrose–table sugar as we know it today–first come into use? Obviously, honey (which I thought was mainly fructose) has been in use by humans for a long while. But what about dry table sugar? Was sugar cane the first source? Beets? Doesn’t sugar cane have New World origins?
All of this was prompted by the recent mailbag article on blood in chocolate (http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmchocblood.html), in which Jill said:
“Cortez brought cocoa beans back to Europe, where
they soon figured out that it tastes a lot better if you add sugar to it.”
From A Brief History of Sugar"
“Sugar as a commodity in its own right can be traced back several thousand years in China and India. A definite reference dates to 510 B.C. when soldiers of the Persian Emperor Darius saw sugar cane growing on the banks of the River Indus. They called it the reeds which produce honey without bees. Much later it was grown in Persia and the Arabs took it to Egypt. The word sugar is itself derived from an Arabic word.”
" By 600 A.D. the practice of breaking up the sugar cane and boiling it to produce sugar crystals was widespread. …
By the middle of the fifteenth century there were plantations in Madeira, the Canary Islands and St. Thomas, and they supplied Europe with sugar until the sixteenth century, when manufacture spread over the greater part of tropical America, followed in the next century by the development of sugar exports from the West Indies."
“The other main source of sugar, sugar beet, although known as a sweet vegetable, was not used as a commercial source of sugar until the second half of the eighteenth century, when Margraf, working in Berlin, discovered a technique for extracting sugar from the beet. This was later further developed by his pupil Achard. Its further development was due in large part to the activities of two major historical figures, Nelson and Napoleon.”
Toadspittle, I found this information by going to http://www.google.com and entering the phrase “History of Sugar” into the search engine’s window.